The present invention relates to data center infrastructure, and more particularly, this invention relates to reducing the overhead associated with using look-up tables in fabric switches to reduce latency.
A switching processor, such as a switching application specific integrated circuit (ASIC), may be used to choose a port to send received network packets. Typically, a look-up table is utilized to choose which port to send a received packet based on a destination address designated in a header of the received packet. However, as fabric networks grow larger, these look-up tables may encompass vast amounts of data, which causes latency in using the look-up table to determine an egress port to forward packets to. Accordingly, it would be beneficial to have a method to reduce the overhead associated with using look-up tables in fabric switches in order to reduce fabric latency.